Dan's Papers - July 4, 2008 - Wall-To-Wall Mattresses and Thirty People

Just before dawn last Sunday morning, Southampton Town Police quietly tiptoed across the newly mowed lawn of a $3-million mansion in Southampton, skirted the pool, the tennis court and hot tub, and then opened the unlocked front door to go inside and step over the bodies there to check for zoning violations.

They found quite a few, not the least important of which were about three dozen 20- and 30-year-olds fast asleep in rooms with wall-to-wall mattresses, trying to sleep off the drunken stupor they had gotten themselves into late the night before.

These people were then herded out into the yard in the dark, where, with eyes bloodshot, hair a mess, and clothes disheveled, they stood in line to be interviewed by policemen with flashlights who were interested in knowing just who these individuals were.

Of course, who they all were, were very important up-and-coming college graduates looking for a fancy good time in the Hamptons for the summer, in a grand house not far from the ocean - in this case, at 674 Millstone Road. And they received summonses for a variety of things such as overcrowding, having no fire alarms or carbon dioxide sensors and for just being bad people for participating in activities that had outraged the neighborhood for three weeks - urinating in the yard, yelling all night, coming and going until the wee hours of the morning, and showing no concern for the rest of the neighborhood. Families live along Millstone Road. There are laws against this kind of thing.

It's not hard to locate "group" houses and landlords looking for 20 or 30 people to populate a four-bedroom house in the Hamptons. They are found on Craigslist, on the Village Voice website and many, many other places. You pay $1,500 a weekend and you get a fancy house in the Hamptons, a place to lay your head at night, all you can drink and whatever you bring home to eat (if you're willing to put your name on it when you put it in the refrigerator so everybody knows that food's taken).

Thirty people a weekend can bring the guy organizing this business about $300,000 a month for a house he's probably rented for $90,000. He gets to ride around in a Lamborghini. You get to roll over and accidentally put your finger in the eye of the girl who's drunk and passed out next to you, who might wake up and by next year become your girlfriend.

But hey, on the beach, millionaire or share-house slug, everybody looks the same. So who cares?

The New York Post broke this story last Thursday, five days after the raid, and when they called up the owner of this property, who is Gerald Falcone, a New York real estate executive living on Manhattan's West Side, he expressed amazement and outrage that this was going on at his house. He had no idea.

"You completely blindsided me," he told the Post reporter. He said he was shocked. He had no clue this was going on. He had rented this house to who he thought was an upstanding fellow with a Land Rover. Just that one person. It was for him and his family. A raid? He had not heard that there had been a raid. Did the reporter have the right address?

If it is possible for you to find share-houses in the Hamptons by looking on Craigslist or the Village Voice or other places, be aware that not only can you do that, but so can the Southampton Town Police. In fact, their entire investigation to find and ticket share-house residents in that town can consist of just Googling "share-house Millstone Southampton," or any other thought-provoking combination.

The owner of the property can do this, too. Indeed, it's probably a good idea after somebody nods and says that, yes, they'll pay you $90,000 to rent your house, to get a sense of what they had in mind to do there.

The police intend to conduct more of these early Sunday morning raids on out-of-control share-houses. They've got loads of summer interns sitting at computers, Googling addresses. They do drive-bys. Twenty cars in a driveway is a good clue.

Given the price of real estate out here, nobody really objects to people renting out shares for places to stay in the summer in a reasonable and dignified fashion. It isn't legal, really. And if it's done and if it's a four-bedroom house that has eight people sleeping in it and they behave themselves, who's to know? A $40,000 boodle put together for such a thing could rent a small but otherwise nice house.

But when you get up into the stratosphere with the uncontrollable desire to get the full Hamptons billionaire experience, it means wall-to-wall mattresses, and probably a date with the town police.